Via Infoshop News
Monday, April 11 2011 @ 02:24 PM UTC
Contributed by: WorkerFreedom
Views: 301
by Tim Acott
The text from an introductory pamphlet written by a member of the Portland, Oregon IWW branch.
Solidarity
Working people have only one real option in today’s economy. We have to resist, with all our might, the big business program of further and deeper poverty for working people. For the first time in modern history profits are going up while wages and benefits are going down. In the past the two have always been tied, however unequally. Now the game has changed. Worse impoverishment and more of it is the wave of the future if we don’t stand against the tide. The working conditions we see today in Asia and Central America are a good indication of the future of our own working lives in the “Western Democracies.”
We have only one hope of fending off this tidal wave of misery. That hope, that tool, is solidarity. Every working stiff must stand up for every other working stiff, no matter where you live or where you come from, no matter if you are male or female, young or old, we must stand together. Every loss to any worker is a loss to us all, and every gain by any part of the working class is a victory for us all.
We must stand together. We must refuse to handle scab goods, to buy scab products, to cross the picket line. We must extend our hands across the borders and across the seas. We must support each worker’s struggle as if it were our very own because that is exactly what it is.
Together we can win. Together we can make this world a better place to live, to raise our children, to spend our old age.
Direct Action
Direct action can be defined as the use of any tool, tactic or strategy that you can control yourself. It means using tactics, which directly address your problem. It’s straightforward and simple and you can trust it. It succeeds or fails according to how good your idea is, how forcefully it is applied, how appropriate it is to the situation.
Voting for candidates who promise to fix your problems for you is not direct action. To strike, to slow down, to sit down on the job are direct actions. To symbolically protest for the purpose of getting press coverage, in hopes that it will build support or sympathy for your cause is not direct action, no matter what the tactics of your protest may be. To walk the picket line with a fellow worker from a different trade, from a different shop, from a different nation is direct action.
It takes only the briefest glance at history to see that what is given to us can be taken away. The only gains we can hope to hold are those that we take and defend with our own hands and hearts. Those crumbs that are thrown to us from time to time by the rich and their government are always taken back.
The government serves the interest of the ruling class, and will always do so. We can expect the same from them in the future as we have gotten so far, a sop once in awhile perhaps, to confuse us and weaken our resolve, but mostly the boot, the club, and the clanging of cell doors. Direct action plus solidarity equals success.
The only tactics of struggle and defense that we can trust are those that we, the working people, control. Direct action gets the goods. To defend ourselves we need to stand together and stand up for ourselves.
Every Worker Needs a Union
In recent years union membership has steadily dropped. It’s no real wonder, given the bureaucratic nature of the union movement and the frequency of sellouts, that most working people today don’t have much faith in the union. How could we?
Nonetheless, the need still exists for a working class organization to defend and further the interest of the working people at their jobs. That’s union. We need it. Nobody is going to stand up for us. The political parties will court our votes and our donations, but real money talks, and for now the bosses have the real money. They call the tunes in politics. Our only option is union.
We need to build these unions right. We need to build them so that we can control them, so that we can trust, them, so that they will serve our needs only, not the needs of bosses and bureaucrats and political hacks. That means union democracy. It means recallable elected officials who report directly to the rank and file. It means that all-important decisions are made directly by the membership. It means any job or action or strike is controlled by and settled by the workers on the shop floor. It means full disclosure on financial matters and rank and file control over the union funds.
It means doing things very differently than they are done in the business unions. It means doing things the way we do them in the IWW.
Read on…
More than 1,000 nurses at Kaiser-Permanente’s Los Angeles Medical Center walked off the job Wednesday over staffing levels they say threaten patient care. The nurses—members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers—say Kaiser is stalling contract talks and refusing to improve nurse to patient ratios. Photo: NUHW.
With the largest protests in Wisconsin history unfolding, labor activists are drawing on a new sense of power to reject both their union leaders’ concessions and the massive service cuts the governor proposes. Photo: Sue Ruggles.
The Wobbly Goblin 